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In-Game Purchases, Users Interact. Watch Dogs Legion Standard Edition. PC (Digital) PS4/PS5 (Digital) Xbox (Digital) Discover editions. $17.99 /Month. With. Premium.
- Don't fear the reaper.
- Look Back: What We Said About Watch Dogs 2
- The Best Open Worlds in Video Games
- Permadeath – Yay or Nay?
- Multiplayer, Eventually
- Microtransaction Reaction
- Verdict
By Dan Stapleton
Updated: Mar 4, 2021 5:59 pm
Posted: Oct 28, 2020 11:01 am
After decades of running over pedestrians by the dozen in open-world action games without a second thought, it’s actually a little bit unsettling to think that each of them might have unique talents and even the potential to be a hero. Not so much that I drive more carefully or anything, but after playing Watch Dogs: Legion I think about it a little bit more. Legion’s clever twist makes this third game in the series play like a hacker version of State of Decay, where every NPC can be recruited as a playable character and each has their own weapons, abilities, and traits that can give them very different playstyles. That lends it a much more sandboxy feel than the previous games because any given character can make the same mission feel dramatically different. It can be rough and experimental in places, but I have to hand it to Ubisoft for being willing to take chances like this.
Legion’s map is a vision of a near-future London metropolitan area, and similar to Watch Dogs 2’s compressed version of the San Francisco Bay Area it is beautifully detailed and immediately recognizable – but this time it’s also starkly different from how we know it. Its skies are dense with autonomous drones patrolling the streets and ferrying parcels; streets are filled with a mix of old gas-guzzlers and Tesla-style self-driving cars; and its landmarks are emblazoned with corporate-fascist banners and bright holographic projections. It’s a cool look, though cruising around busier areas can definitely tank your frame rate even on a GeForce RTX 2080Ti and Core-i7 7700K (even without ray tracing I couldn’t get close to holding 60fps at 1440p when I was moving fast).
There aren’t a lot of direct connections to the previous two games, but the story still centers around the DedSec hacker/vigilante group, this time serving as a resistance movement against a techno-fascist police state that’s clamped down on Britains’ freedom after a major terrorist attack (blamed on DedSec). There are some overt political themes in play here, such as privatizing the police being a bad idea, how giving up personal privacy for convenience and security is a good way to end up in a dystopia, and maybe immigrants shouldn’t be rounded up into camps and deported.
Watch Dogs 2’s distinctive hacking and puzzle mechanics do a great job of reminding you that you’re not playing just another Grand Theft Auto clone as you tear through its beautiful Bay Area map. Marcus is a bit too friendly of a guy to be believable as our instrument of mayhem, but the flexible missions let you get through mostly non-violently if you’re good enough at stealth. And when it works, multiplayer is good unconventional cat-and-mouse fun, too. - Dan Stapleton, November 23, 2016
Score: 8.5
Read the Full Watch Dogs 2 Review
It’s good that Bagley steals the show because the playable characters do not, simply because there are so many of them. Instead of controlling an individual like Aiden Pearce or Marcus Holloway, you’re controlling the entire team and can swap between them at will. More than that, the big idea of Legion is that virtually any NPC can be recruited into DedSec, and that system is pretty well realized. Just walk up to anybody you see on the street, scan them to check out their abilities, and then do a mission for them – usually something involving beating up some gangsters or wiping incriminating evidence from a server – and then they’ll join up and become playable. Whether it’s a construction worker, a stock broker, a medic, a protester, a hitman, or even a security guard, they can all be recruited in one way or another, though sometimes you have to work a little harder by drilling down into their personal profile to find ways to win them over.
Just walk up to anybody you see on the street, scan them to check out their abilities, and then do a mission for them, and they'll become playable.
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These folks are less powerful than a typical action game character because they never individually gain new abilities like Aiden and Marcus did. It can feel a bit limiting to only have access to a few weapons and skills at a time, but it’s actually kind of refreshing to not play as a jack of all trades. I did feel like I’d seen most of what Legion had to offer in the first third of the campaign, but finding new and unique people to play as refreshed it every once in a while. Happening across a street magician who dresses like a high-tech pimp was the shot in the arm my playthrough needed, especially because his special ability is to hypnotize an enemy to fight for you in the middle of combat. He’s become a favorite of mine.
A magician who dresses like a high-tech pimp was the shot in the arm my playthrough needed.
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That said, I’ve yet to find anybody with some of the signature abilities of Watch Dogs 1 and 2; there’s no changing traffic lights, no calling in of police or gang members to attack a target, or city-wide system crash as far as I’ve seen. I missed them a bit, but I don’t mind Legion breaking out of the series’ habits a little. Speaking of which, the extremely arcadey driving is pretty thoroughly deemphasized – only a handful of story missions involve driving vehicles at all and police chases are trivial to avoid.
No! My precious characters must live forever!
Death comes for us all.
The most interesting characters play substantially differently. You can use someone with lots of heavy weapons (like a military veteran) to shoot your way through most missions with relatively straightforward gunfights, or just about anybody can use cameras and tiny spider drones (fact check: they only have six legs, they are not spiders!) to reach an objective and hack it without ever physically setting foot in an encounter area. Alternatively, recruiting a member of the private police corporation and using them to infiltrate guarded areas plays like a Hitman game, since you can stroll through undetected as long as you don’t let anybody get too close a look at you. There are a lot of possibilities, and the intricate level design goes a long way toward enabling you to come up with different ways to approach most of the scenarios – including using the construction worker’s slow-flying cargo drone to bypass half a mission.
Tech Points encourage you to investigate every area of the map rather than just racking up XP with headshots.
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While characters don’t level up, there’s a selection of persistent upgrades that you can unlock that are applied to the whole group: improved drone hacking, faster pistol reloads, a personal cloaking device, that sort of thing. It does give you some overall progression as you go through the campaign, and I like how these are unlocked using Tech Points you gather by exploring the world and going out of your way to find during missions. It’s a good way to encourage you to investigate every area of the map rather than just racking up XP with headshots.
Traditionally, Watch Dogs games have come with some innovative multiplayer modes, such as the hide-and-seek style invasions and creative car chases. Legion does promise four-player co-op… later. It hasn’t been switched on yet – that’ll come in a free update in early December, Ubisoft says. Currently, there’s no multiplayer at all.
Finally, a heads up that we’ve seen a fair number of crashes (on both PC and Xbox One – we haven’t seen PlayStation 4 copies as of this writing), so if you can wait for a few patches to smooth things out that might be a good call. Switching to DirectX 11 instead of 12 solved a lot of my PC stability issues.
I played all the way through Watch Dogs: Legion without knowing there were any sort of microtransactions available. I had to go digging for them, and when I finally found them I had to wonder "Why? Why do these exist? For who?" Aside from the $40 USD season pass, which promises future content, all you can do is buy "Credits" which are not a unit of...
Watch Dogs Legion takes Ubisoft’s open-world hacker series in an interesting new direction by letting you swap between the inhabitants of a near-future London almost at will. There’s enough variety in the way different characters play to make that a good tradeoff for not having one traditionally progressing character with a fleshed-out personality,...
Jul 15, 2020 · Watch Dogs: Legion will have both a single-player mode and an online co-op mode where players can play online with up to three friends to "take on entirely new co-op missions and challenging end ...
Oct 29, 2020 · Watch Dogs: Legion's bold use of roguelike mechanics in an open-world action game pays off in interesting ways, making this visit to near-future London feel more varied than the previous two games ...
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Oct 28, 2020 · The Bottom Line. Watch Dogs: Legion delivers an immersive open world where nearly any character that you encounter can become a high-tech freedom fighter. Legion's unique hacking mechanics and ...
Oct 29, 2020 · Watch Dogs Legion, a game where you can play anyone and I mean ANYONE you see, which is a good concept, but that’s best think about it. The story was decent, the combat was fun, but the parkour wasn’t great. But generally, I’ve had a lot of fun with the game.
